The New York TImes reports on another data security breach in the federal government:

Federal authorities are investigating the loss of a computer hard drive containing a huge quantity of personal information from Bill Clinton’s presidency in an apparent security breach at a National Archives record center, government officials said Tuesday.

Government officials briefed on the matter said the breach, which was confirmed in April, involved the loss of a drive containing a terabyte of computerized data, which could include millions of individual pieces of information, including personal information about one of then Vice President Al Gore’s three daughters.

The missing information included Social Security numbers and home addresses of numerous people who visited or worked at the White House, along with other material related to security procedures used by the Secret Service at the White House in the Clinton years. [...]

Other officials said it was not known whether the hard drive had been stolen or accidentally misplaced. They added that it did not appear that classified information related to national security was taken but that analysts had not yet completed their review of the vast quantity of information stored on the drive.

The Wall Street Journal reports on a survey about privacy and employees:

A majority of business executives believe that they have a right to know what their employees are doing on social-networking sites, but most workers say it’s none of their bosses’ business, according to a new survey by Deloitte.

The survey was conducted in April with about 2,000 U.S. adults. Of the 500 respondents with managerial job titles (vice president, CIO, partner, board member, etc.), 299, or 60%, agreed that businesses have a right to know how employees portray themselves or their companies on sites like Facebook and MySpace.

But 53% of employee respondents said their profiles are none of their employers’ business, and 61% said that they wouldn’t change what they were doing online even if their boss was monitoring their activities. [...]

Some workers are aware that the wrong comment or photo can come back to haunt them, and 29% said the economy has prompted them to be more careful online. Seven percent said they knew of a co-worker who’d been let go because of “inappropriate behavior online” in the last six months, and 2% said that their Twitter, MySpace or Facebook page had kept them from getting a job.

The New York Times has an interesting story on the data credit card companies have on their customers. This is a good companion piece to a story they did in February on the customer data being scrutinized by American Express to affect customers’ credit.

Put another way, credit-card companies are becoming much more interested in understanding their customers’ lives and psyches, because, the theory goes, knowing what makes cardholders tick will help firms determine who is a good bet and who should be shown the door as quickly as possible.

Luckily for the industry, small groups of executives at most of the large firms have spent the last decade studying cardholders from almost every angle, and collection agencies have developed more sophisticated dunning techniques. They have sought to draw psychological and behavioral lessons from the enormous amounts of data the credit-card companies collect every day. They’ve run thousands of tests and crunched the numbers on millions of accounts. [...] Read more »

CBS News reports on a story raising questions about the Internet and privacy.

CBS News correspondent Ben Tracy reports a court ruling is expected soon in the case that’s exposed the dark side of the Internet and uncovered the pain of the Catsouras family, who say they’ve been forced to constantly relive the death of their 18-year-old daughter, Nikki, who was killed during a high-speed crash in 2006.

Nikki was driving close to 100 m.p.h. on Halloween night when she clipped another car, flipped across the median and crashed into a toll booth. Very little remained of the Porsche she drove and the condition of Nikki’s body was so disturbing that the coroner would not allow the Catsouras family to identify it.

However, days after the accident, millions of people saw pictures from Nikki’s crash on the Internet after at least one California Highway Patrol dispatcher allegedly e-mailed photos of the scene to friends. From there, the photos spread very quickly and landed on the Internet.

“I didn’t understand it initially,” said Christos Catsouras, Nikki’s father. “I didn’t understand it…[I said] ‘what do you mean there are pictures?’”

The most disturbing photos were of Nikki’s nearly decapitated head. Catsouras said someone e-mailed him one of those pictures.

The Associated Press reports that the California Department of Public Health has issued a fine for breaches of a woman’s medical privacy rights, the first such fine for a hospital under a patient privacy law passed last year. I have written before about hospital employees snooping in the files of celebrities.

The state fined Kaiser Permanente $250,000 Thursday for violating patient privacy laws when several hospital employees inappropriately accessed medical records for octuplet mother Nadya Suleman.

Kaiser spokesman Jim Anderson said the hospital did not expect the reprimand, noting that Kaiser reported the violations to the state in February and punished nearly two dozen employees. Read more »

I have written before about attempts by the FBI to infiltrate 2004 Republican National Convention protesters in New York and the publicly condemned domestic surveillance program, COINTELPRO. Now, the Des Moines Register reports the FBI infiltrated an Iowa anti-war group before last year’s Republican National Convention in Minnesota.

An FBI informant and an undercover Minnesota sheriff’s deputy spied on political activists in Iowa City last year before the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn.

Confidential FBI documents obtained by The Des Moines Register show an FBI informant was planted among a group described as an “anarchist collective” that met regularly last year in Iowa City. One of the group’s goals was to organize street blockades to disrupt the Republican convention, held Sept. 1-4, 2008, where U.S. Sen. John McCain was nominated for president. [...]

The FBI documents provide in-depth descriptions of more than a dozen Iowa political activists. This includes personal information such as names, height, weight, place of employment, cell phone numbers and e-mail addresses. The documents also include individuals’ plans for the convention demonstrations. [...]

Russell Porter, director of the Iowa Department of Public Safety’s Intelligence Bureau, declined to comment specifically on whether law enforcement officers monitored Iowa political activists who planned protests at the Republican National Convention.

But, he added, “If people are planning criminal activity, we would be interested in having people report that information to us and share that with us.”